Ontario Concord growers face hard times

This disappointing development comes as a blow to many juice-grape growers in Ontario as demand for real wholesome grape juice declines in favour of flavoured artificial drinks. I am sad to see this happening, especially since so many Concord vineyards in the Peninsula would under any other circumstances qualify as "old vines" plantings for the sheer length of time that those veteran vines have been in the ground. If only more people had thought about how to raise the quality bar on labrusca winemaking in this province, perhaps some of those families would be in better shape today, being able to sell to wineries rather than juice plants.

Excerpt: Howard Staff's grandfather planted the first field of Concord grapes on the family farm, located on the Niagara Peninsula near Jordan, Ont., more than a century ago. Now Staff is faced with unsettling prospect of letting the grapes in the same field, along with those on hundreds of adjacent acres, literally die on the vine. "I think the public are being duped into buying coloured water," ... "And here we are producing a wholesome food product, but no one wants to buy it. It's a travesty."

Link to the article in the Toronto Star: Grape Growers Crushed

That is very sad Paul. I think Mr Staff's statement is very true. I for one drink grape juice regularly. There is no comparison to the garbage labeled "drink".
I have had concord grape wine that I really enjoyed. I remember one bottle I purchased while on vacation about 20 years ago in PA. It was from a winery called New Hope and it was really good. Lovely grape taste, nice acidity, not too sweet, I tried to purchase it later but could not locate it. I agree with you, it's too bad a serious effort never seems to have been made to produce high quality concord wines. Tom V

I dislike this trend, too. I've never understoond why it is necessary to add sweetener to fruit juice. Midwesterners may disagree, but one of the biggest reasons is the heavy U.S. subsidies for corn production (along with tarrifs on sugar so a few politically connected growers in the Everglades can continue their horrible practices), so corn syrup is really really cheap. Some scientists speculate corn syrup is one of the many reasons for the obesity epidemic.

Brian, that's interesting. I noted the use of corn syrup in pop State-side many years ago on shopping trips, and wondered why they don't just use sugar. Now I guess I know.

Having said that, if the question is why add sweetener to fruit juice, a salient question might be: Do they need to add something because people want it sweeter than it'd naturally be, or because there's lots of sweetener out there on the market that needs to be sold to someone?

Brian pretty much hit it on the head. Even as a midwesterner, I'll admit that the subsidies for corn are contributing to this. I don't think that it's a "taste" thing, where people want overly sweet juice. That may be part of it, but overall the problem is that it's way cheaper to make a drink with corn syrup and ~5% juice than to make actual grape juice.

Brian pretty much hit it on the head. Even as a midwesterner, I'll admit that the subsidies for corn are contributing to this. I don't think that it's a "taste" thing, where people want overly sweet juice. That may be part of it, but overall the problem is that it's way cheaper to make a drink with corn syrup and ~5% juice than to make actual grape juice.

Quite Right Ben, it's not that they are adding corn syrup to pure fruit juice, its already sweet, but as you point out, it's cheaper to sell sugared water with a wee bit of fruit juice and artificial color & flavor than it is to sell pure fruit juice. Not only that, sorry to say that many Americans who were raised on soda probably prefer the taste of the goop! Tom V